Writing Instruction Must Serve A Purpose

Writing instruction must be applied to an engaging purpose. Writing always serves some kind of purpose, but students become disengaged and won’t fully benefit from instruction on writing if the purpose of what they write is to give students a grade. Students need a purpose that entices their desire and interest to write. Janine Reed explains in her text, Self-Orientation in “Expressive Writing” Instruction that “writing from experience helps students become confident in their abilities as writers and empowered by the they write. Indeed, the only good subject matter… is material that comes of students’ own experiences” (111-12). A relevant purpose brings meaningful experiences under closer examination, which makes students feel passionate enough to explore and better understand. Jessica Singer is an excellent example of a teacher who gave their students an authentically engaging purpose for writing a paper. Students’ purpose to write was to “use reading and writing to learn about and participate as agents of change. Rather than studying how suffering and wrongdoing are perpetuated, students learned to become activists” (Singer 1-2). Her students were doing more than learning writing instruction; they were learning how writing instruction could be used as a means of empowerment. The purpose of their papers was to create change, which, through writing instruction, could be successfully and effectively constructed to create an actual change in society. Since the students who I work with are from either China or South Korea, they are experiencing living in a different culture—American—from their own. With this in mind, they were given a writing assignment with the purpose of explaining to Americans some aspect of their culture that they would like to share. They did this through choosing an artifact from their culture that was meaningful or significant to them. By having students decide for themselves what cultural artifact that they wanted to write about, the purpose of their papers became more meaningful. Students were given time to consider what cultural artifact was most meaningful to them. Because the class aims to prepare students for college-level writing, this assignment aims to teach students how to write different genres through multiple modes and the writing processes involved. Yet, genre should be considered the most important component in writing instruction. Without a significant genre, students will be less engaged with the processes of writing and view the mode of writing as a restrictive equation where you insert ideas rather than express ideas. Amy Devitt in her text, Teaching Critical Genre Awareness, finds, “Genre teaching can indeed be formulaic and constraining, if genres are taught as forms without social or cultural meaning” (337). Devitt recognizes how the genre gives students the sense of purpose with writing. Students who are, for example, told to write an expository essay on tomatoes and have no meaningful connection to tomatoes will never see how the expository essay can be useful or be able to enjoy the building and expression of thoughts (the process of writing). My students are writing about a cultural artifact, or genre, of their choosing, which gives students a meaningful task. This means, when it comes time to explain what an expository essay is, students will be able to understanding easier how the mode functions to effectively arrange and connect their thoughts and ideas. Students will want to figure out what to say to their reader and how to best say it. Purpose, in writing, becomes the key into the students’ motivation and engagement with writing instruction.